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NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, March-April 2016
my previous speeches is that I do not
compromise on safety and security for
the nation’s commercial nuclear facilities.
And what I hope is clear from the voting
record of the Commission as a whole is
our commitment to independent decision
making.
While we at the Commission may
not always agree among ourselves, while
our staff may disagree with each other
as they formulate positions, while we
may reach conclusions in ways others
may not always agree on – we are doing
what we believe is necessary to meet
our mandate of reasonable assurance of
adequate protection. Or, per the back-
fit rule, we have determined that a new
regulation or requirement provides a
substantial increase in overall safety and
that additional costs are justified.
Part and parcel of everything we
do is an assessment of risk. And I think
that is an area where there has been a
significant shift in public perception and
acceptance since 1978. If you are my age
and were raised in the U.S., think back
for a moment about the risks we took as
children – or that our parents accepted on
our behalf.
We didn’t wear seat belts. We didn’t
wear bicycle helmets. We smoked –
well some of us did – we wandered our
neighborhoods freely. We ate white
bread and TV dinners and processed
meats and no one lectured us about the
nutritional deficits or the health risks.
We had no idea that one day the World
Health Organization would announce the
dangers of a BLT.
To be sure, changes in some
behaviors and practices have saved lives.
Wearing seat belts in cars is perhaps the
most obvious example.
Today, for reasons I’ll leave to
the sociologists to describe, there is a
considerable level of risk aversion, of
fear, even paranoia, about what could be
considered relatively small risks. And we
need only look at the headlines and see
the arguing on social media to realize
how differently people perceive the risks
facing the world today. The arguing over
the administration of vaccines is a good
example.
At the same time, counterintuitively,
we may dismiss as meaningless or
unsubstantiated what others consider to
be considerable risk. The global debate
over climate change seems to fall into
that latter category. How did assessment
of risk become so fraught with politics
and emotion?
Supreme Court Justice Stephen
Breyer wrote a fascinating book,
published in 1991, on the subject of
risk and regulation. The book is titled
“Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward
Effective Risk Regulation.”
In this book, Breyer points out that
regulators generally have a two-part job –
risk assessment (i.e. measure it) and risk
management (i.e. what are we going to do
about it). In the risk assessment part of
the equation, the NRC will be informed
by the probability and consequence of
an event. For the management part of it,
we’re going to use our broad discretion
to act through the lens of adequate
protection with an eye on predictable and
stable decision making.
Breyer’s book underscores that the
public’s evaluation of risk often differs
radically from the experts. The book
includes a table with survey results from
two groups of what might generally be
called “the lay public.” Both put nuclear
power at the top of their perceived risk
list, while experts in the field ranked
nuclear 20 out of 30, behind car accidents,
handguns, smoking, police work and food
preservatives.
Says Breyer: “when we treat tiny,
moderate and large risks too much alike
we begin to resemble the boy who cried
wolf.”
While Breyer doesn’t single out the
phraseology “adequate protection” as a
verbal stumbling block, he might well
have. Risk makes people nervous and
mere invocation of “adequate protection”
– even “reasonable assurance” -- may
not provide the confidence they need that
their regulator, basically, has their back.
So what is a regulator to do?
This might be where I lay out my
“five point plan” or give you “three things
to think about.” Instead, I’m going to give
you just one concept to think about, and
that concept’s connection to risk and
the public’s perception of the NRC’s
regulatory role.
That concept is trust. Or, as the
agency’s Strategic Plan states as
our vision: A trusted, independent,
transparent, and effective nuclear
regulator.
Let’s focus just on trust for the
moment. Researchers have found – and
we know this intuitively -- that trust plays
an important role in how we accept and
respond to risk. Our acceptance of risk
in, say, smoking, eating bacon, global
warming, nuclear power – is related in
no small part to how much we trust the
person or institution telling us what the
risk is.
If we don’t trust them – or we don’t
know them well enough to place our trust
in them – we are skeptical of their risk
calculations and risk communication. We
won’t believe in the reliability of their
information or trust their judgement or
their decisions. We may not believe them
when they say there is no wolf at the door.
This can be a very difficult situation
for a federal regulator overseeing a highly
technical and complex industry that
many people simply don’t understand,
especially when what we’re regulating
– radiation -- cannot be seen or felt or
heard.
The NRC must make decisions
and function in an environment where,
I believe, government as a whole is
often not trusted and where there is a
tremendous public division over the
trustworthiness of science in general
and federal government scientists in
particular. In my opinion, there is also a
certain distrust of big industry – which the
nuclear power companies are certainly
familiar with.
Breyer’s book also lays out the
dynamic – the vicious circle of his
title – between public fears, political
response to those fears by lawmakers
and the independent regulator. And
while his solution of a new, professional
bureaucracy with interagency jurisdiction
may not be wholly feasible, his notion
that this dynamic is worth attending to, I
believe, is an important one.
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